


never the same river twice

by lostlenore



Category: Shaderunners (Webcomic)
Genre: Backstory, Heist, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-01 02:07:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11476362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostlenore/pseuds/lostlenore
Summary: It’s typical of Ezra’s luck that Easton Lynch isn’t interested in being any type of gentleman.





	never the same river twice

**Author's Note:**

> Probably jossed by the time I finish writing this but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Born of Ella Fitzgerald's version of [_Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNJ-teaAIHA), and that panel in chapter five where Easton implies Ezra is better at 'playing the fancy man' than Ivo thinks he is. The poem Ezra recites is [The Dream Keeper](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-dream-keeper) by Langston Hughes, title is Heraclitus.  
> 

1.

Most people don't think of Easton Lynch as being born. Ask anyone in East Ironside and they'll tell you: Easton Lynch rolled out of the gutter fully formed, the stub of a cigarette on his lips, and a pair of trick aces tucked in his sleeve. Easton Lynch sprouted, like a weed pushing through the cracks in the road, or sprung from the head of whatever deity champions libertines with a penchant for unwatered moonshine. The image of Lynch as a child is unsettling, and the image of him as any stripe of innocent, more so. Lynch himself is fond of telling folks he's the prince of cats, the mongrel sort that sailors keep in every port for luck. 

"King of a kingdom of strays," he'll say with a wink. Any tale so tall as to paint Lynch into royalty leaves most people rolling their eyes.

Ezra doesn’t like to think of himself as most people, but when the maid escorts an aging Gilt with Easton’s mouth into the parlor Ezra’s first thought is still, _oh, he was telling the truth_.

“I hope you weren’t waiting long, Mr…” The man sits in the armchair across from him as if it were a throne. This, too, Ezra recognizes. Here, in this ghostly house on the Upper Streets of Ironside, this man taught Easton Lynch how to sit like he owns the entire world. 

“Kelly, sir.” Ezra forces the words out, as clipped and cold as the fat pair of diamonds on the Gilt’s fingers. “Ezra Kelly.”

He doesn't say: I'm here to steal from you.

 

2.

Ezra doesn’t turn tricks, he’d like to make that very clear. He’s spent far too long clawing his way out of gutters and side-alleys into the light to be dragged back there again, even for pay.

Instead he makes...arrangements. Always with gentlemen, the kind with enough coin to keep Ezra in gilded manuscripts and pocket watches, good food and good wine, and the heavy wool suits Ezra craves, the ones that feel like the wide press of a hand on his back.

“What do they think I’m going to do with all these goddamn watches,” Ezra mutters, keeping one eye on the pawnbroker, one eye on the way Pam’s fondling a terrifying bear trap of a machine ostensibly used for ‘cracking walnuts.’ Ezra has his doubts.

“Tell the time?” Pam says, dry as a bone. The iron jaws of the contraption snap shut and the pawnbroker jumps.

“Thirty coppers,” he says quickly. “The filigree work on the face is very fine, but the metal isn’t of quality.”

“Forty,” Pam says, in the voice they usually reserved for bullies and door-to-door salesmen.

“Thirty-five.”

Ezra sighs. For a lawyer, Mr. Kavori had been excessively stingy--with pleasure, with books, and apparently with tokens as well. Ezra had consoled himself with the two handsomely-bound law books he’d had the foresight to stash away before their arrangement ended.

A watch in exchange for his time had a certain poetry to it, he’d admit, but Ezra has plans. Plans that involve a different bespoke suit for every day of the week, three meals a day, and a mahogany-paneled library with books stacked from floor to ceiling. He wants a wealth that’s more than one fire away from spitting Ezra back onto the street, the way his parents...well. He tries not to think of it.

Back to the present, where Pam finishes running rings around the pawnbroker to the tune of forty-four coppers.

“Set aside half for the Shop Fund,” Pam says, leading the way back to where the cart leans against the face of the shop. They’re in a nicer neighborhood than usual, so Ezra’s not worried about it being gone, but it’s worry born out of habit, and hard to shake. Kids don’t live to be adults where Ezra and Pam grew up without developing a healthy sense of paranoia.

“Split the remaining…” Pam trails off delicately.

“Fifty-fifty,” Ezra insists.

“You’ve already paid me back for the cart. Twice,” Pam says, like Ezra doesn’t know how long it took them digging around in the junkyard to find matching wheels.

“Then you can buy us lunch,” Ezra says. “There’s a cart down by the docks that sells killer steamed buns.”

“Killer buns, hmm?” He flushes, even though Pam doesn’t do innuendo. Those eleven coppers will spend fast, Ezra’s only thinking ahead. Kavori’s files contained, among other interesting tidbits, a statement from His Lordship Gideon Lynch regarding his son Easton’s status in the family will. It’s a lead worth checking out.

“It’s just a suggestion,” he says. Pam rolls their eyes, but helps him pick up the cart.

 _Kelly Books & Bindings _ reads the carefully painted sign. _Buy, Sell, Repair, and Trade_.

Someday, Ezra tells himself, he’ll own his own books. He’ll have a library to rival the best of universities, with all the knowledge of the world at his fingertips and enough money for two copies of every book that burned on his parents shelves. Hell, Ezra might even get to _go_ to university. He could spend his days arguing law and philosophy with the best of them, writing his own papers, lecturing on his own ideas.  

Someday.

 

3. 

 It’s typical of Ezra’s luck that Easton Lynch isn’t interested in being any type of gentleman.

“Bring me all of your dreams,” Ezra groans. He tangles his fingers tighter in Easton’s hair, trying to focus on the diamond ridge of his words. Why bother practicing his accent in the mirror when keeping his composure in the face of Easton is a better, truer test?

“You dreamer, bring me all your--your--” He tries to arch into the wet heat of Easton’s mouth, and is rewarded with a firm hand anchoring his hips in place. Ezra finds this deeply unfair. He digs a heel into the meat of Easton’s shoulder, and the vibrations of Easton’s answering laugh are something he can feel in all the places they’re joined.

“Heart melodies!” Ezra gasps, with the fervor of a drowning man spotting a lifeboat. Sweat prickles in the small of his back. “Bring me all your heart melodies, that I may wrap them in a blue cloud-cloth.” 

The words fall out of him in a rush, the shine on his vowels falling away as Easton takes him apart. By the time he reaches the “too-rough fingers of the world,” love's been rough with him indeed. Ezra’s begging, choked and hot, as Easton’s mouth moves against him. There's no air--there's no room in him for anything but the delicious, aching feeling of Easton inside him, but Ezra holds onto the feeling anyway, chasing it to the very last. 

Later, once they finish, Easton tosses Ezra his crumbling poetry book and rewards himself with a well-earned cigarette. 

“You started slipping there towards the end,” he says, but there's no heat in it. "Wouldn't have known you weren't some big-shot Inklord otherwise." 

“Whose fault is that?” Ezra razzes back. Or, he tries to. It’s made difficult by the way Ezra’s toes are still curled, his whole body blissed out on the high of Easton’s touch. Easton has what Pam would call wandering hands, trailing his fingers through the sensitive dip of Ezra’s thigh.

"Fault, no. Credit, yes." Easton smiles. His words are rough around the edges and too polished in the middle, like Ezra’s speech inverted. Disinheritance suits him; Easton is as generous with his affection as he is with his coin. There's a warm easiness to him that Ezra's last few arrangements have lacked, and Ezra finds himself starving for it. Easton might not be a gentleman, but Ezra could make worse deals than teaching an ex-Gilt how to live in the gutter if the sex is always like that. 

Easton must be able to see the gears whirring in his head because he stokes Ezra with a maddening lightness of touch and says, with that infuriating smile, _let me tell you a story._

 

4. 

"Before I forget, I brought you a present." Easton leans over the side of the bed to fiddle with something under the mattress. The position does good things for the smooth muscles of his back, Ezra can't help but notice. 

“Do I want to know where you got,” Ezra squints at the papers in his hand, “piano scores?”

Easton’s answering grin shines like a knife in the half-dark of the room. “I got it from a music shop, where else?”

“Right.” Though he imagines Easton probably did. He’s getting better at faking like a born gutter-blood, though he still trips up sometimes in early mornings where he ties Ezra’s tie for him, unthinking. Easton is learning, like Ezra, in fits and starts. He still does things like buy Ezra piano scores and pulp novels, but they’re outweighed by the times he’s caught Easton stumbling through doing his own laundry, fixing the leaky tap in his apartment, wearing shoes with holes in them. He still hasn’t learned to shave, though whether that’s a gentlemanly uselessness or a pretext for Ezra to do it for him, Ezra can’t decide.

“All the fancy boys back there got lessons in some type of ‘culture’,” Easton says. “Music was one of the more interesting options.” If Easton’s ever once referred to his family’s house as home, Ezra hasn’t heard it. Easton doesn’t talk about it, and Ezra doesn’t know how to ask.

“I don’t know how to play piano,” he says instead, soft.

But his mind’s already racing ahead, wondering what parts Pam could scrap, what he’d have to buy wholesale. Ezra indulges in a rare fantasy: him, in immaculate white tie, sat at a piano bench in a fancy parlor, playing for a group of friends. There's champagne. Laughter. Everything is bathed in the soft golden light of a chandelier, the kind that fairly drip with crystal.

“You’ll pick it up in no time,” Easton’s saying when he tunes back in. “You’ve got a good ear for language, music isn't so different. Ask one of the showgirls down at The Seamaid to help you out. I’m sure they’d be tripping over themselves to snag some quality time with you, _Professor_.”

“Quit blowing smoke,” Ezra says, ignoring his leer.

“There's an idea.” He leans into Ezra’s space again, so that his lips brush the shell of Ezra’s ear. Ezra shivers. "You want a light?"

"It's an expensive habit to break," Ezra says, but he takes the the cigarette and the offered match. 

Easton, in a rare display of wisdom, waits until he's got a light before he pins Ezra to the headboard and steals a drag of Ezra's cigarette. Ezra's frankly angry at himself for finding this an even mixture of hot and entitled, but the hugeness of Easton's hand settled in the crook of his jaw leaves him dazed, his skin tight all over. 

"Let me be your filter," Easton croons. The smoke spills out between them like a kiss, thick and heady, dark as the night sky through the crack in the curtains. 

 

5. 

They have this fight every few months, when Ezra meets a new gentleman of means, and Easton remembers how Ezra makes his money. The two of them can fight over damn near anything: shoes and ships and sealing-wax, cabbages and kings, but this fight cuts Ezra closer to the bone.

“A new Fancy Man this week, then?” Easton says when Erza arrives quietly in the small hours of the night, aching all over, a shiny new watch hanging from his breast pocket.

“Yes,” Ezra grits out. He hates it when Easton talks about his arrangements in that tone, and Easton knows it. Easton walked into a life of dock work and moonshine while Ezra’s had to dole himself out in pieces to scrape his way through life. He has no tower from which to judge Ezra’s choices. “I earn money, I have time to study, I have the guarantee of _a roof over my head_.”

Easton doesn’t get it. He can’t understand why Ezra needs the money, why he refuses to pinch coins from Easton’s modest dock wages, why he doesn’t just pay someone to mock up a university degree and play at being some Inklord’s secretary, gods and Greys be dammed. Ezra sits on the edge of the bed and allows himself the momentary weakness of massaging the headache he can feel building in his temples. He wants a sandwich. He wants a hot shower. He wants a million dollars and a private island. He wants to not have this fight.

“Anything could happen next month, and where would I be?" he says eventually. "I’m playing the hand I was dealt, not the hand I chose.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Easton shoots back. “Do you think I chose this?”

If Ezra didn’t know Easton’s father had disowned his ‘bastard, mix-blooded child’--Easton’s words, not his--he _would_ have guessed Easton chose the docks. Easton never talks about dreams or plans. In all the months Ezra’s known him he’s been perfectly content to move boxes all day, drink alcohol that tastes like engine fuel, and fuck Ezra on every flat surface in his apartment. Not necessarily in that order.

“I chose it as much as any man can really choose, with a knife at his throat” Easton snarls. “A choice between here and that house is no choice at all.”

Ezra knows this, but he looks out the window and sees the gutter waiting for him, for that split-second where he slips up and everything he’s worked so hard for goes up in smoke.

It’s been ages since he’s had to scrounge for food and wash in public fountains. He doesn’t miss it.

“Pam could--” Easton starts.

“Don’t bring Pam into this,” Ezra hisses.

“Fine.” Easton sets his jaw and tips Ezra back onto the mattress.

“Fine.” Ezra grabs a hold of Easton’s suspenders and yanks him down with him.

The rest of their fight is quiet, all in the rough way Easton bites at his mouth when Ezra yanks on his hair. When they break for air, Ezra’s too dizzy to keep yelling. He wishes it didn’t work quite so well, but angry sex with Easton is somehow more incredible than regular sex with Easton.

He’s a little embarrassed about the marks, though.

“You know, the first time I saw you I knew you’d fuck like an angry tomcat.” Easton traces the long, angry red lines Ezra left on the ball of his shoulder with something like approval.

“Romantic.”  

“If you wanted sweet-talking, you should’ve found yourself a nice Tourmie boy,” Easton says, his eyes sharp.

Ezra laughs. “Like I’d know what to do with a nice Tourmie boy if I had one.”

Something in Easton’s expression softens at that. He runs his hands through the disaster zone of Ezra’s un-pomaded hair. “Ah, Kelly.” He sighs. “Go break those rich Gilt’s hearts and come back to me, alright? It’s too quiet here when you’re gone.”

Ezra brings his hand up to trace the quiet frown in the lines of Easton’s mouth. _Come back to me?_ For once, Ezra finds he doesn't have the words he needs.

“I know, I know,” Easton says, lighting a cigarette. Ezra has no idea what expression his face holds, but it has Easton sighing, hiding his face in Ezra’s hair. “Alright, let me tell you a story.”

Ezra has grown to love Easton's ridiculous stories, especially the way he can lay his head down and listen to them rumble through Easton's chest like he's telling them with his whole body.

“Have I told you the one about the Hunter and the Hart yet?”

“No,” Ezra lies, and they're off.

 

6.

Huddled together on the darkest night of a long, dark winter, Easton leans into Ezra and says, “Let me tell you a story about a Queen, and a world where everything breathed in color.”

Half-awake, Ezra turns in the circle of Easton's arms. “I think I've heard that one before,” he says, once Easton finishes.

He hasn't gotten his hands on any mythology texts recently, but the story tugs at something buried in his memory.

“Is that one real?”

“All stories are real, dear Hart” Easton says, and lays a whiskery kiss on Ezra's temple. “But this one is more real than most.”

 

7.

“Ah. The bookman.” The Gilt’s eyes rake over Ezra’s suit, like he can see the stain of poverty on him even if he can’t pull it out of Ezra’s accent. “Charmed, I’m sure.”

Gideon Lynch looks nothing like his son. Where Easton is tall and dark, broad-shouldered and laughing, Gideon is built like a brick the color of curdled milk. There is nothing of Easton’s warmth in him. Only the shape of his mouth and the sharpness of his eyes betrays any relation. They are, somewhat distantly, the same lips that left the dark, purpling bite under Ezra’s collar this morning. Ezra isn’t sure how to untangle that thought at present. He pushes it aside.

Lord Gideon--Ezra refuses to think of him as Lord Lynch, or worse, Easton’s father--holds out a bundle out to the houseboy, who hands it to Ezra. It is a book of fables.

For a moment Ezra just blinks at it, wrong-footed. The book is whimsically bound in marbled board, with delicate inked creatures inching along the spine. It’s so out of place in this chilly mausoleum of a house Ezra isn’t sure what to say. Throughout the house is absolute, ringing silence.

Lord Gideon watches his face intently. “Romantic Tourmie nonsense. The illustrations have value, though.”

Ezra puts on his gloves and gently opens the cover. On the flyleaf is a dedication in Tourmish, written in a feminine hand.  Ezra’s written Tourmaline is better than his spoken, but still too poor to pick out more than three words: _m_ _y darling boy_.

On a hunch he scans the table of contents. He finds the story of the Lovers Sun and Moon, the Poet of Ashes, and hears Easton's voice echoing in every syllable. Near the end, hideously dog-eared and worn, is the story of the Hunter and the Crowned Hart. Ezra’s heart does something stupid in his chest to see it so obviously well-loved.

He lays out the dark linen roll of his father's tools. They're Ezra's tools now, in name and deed. He sets them next to the book, and pauses to marvel at the juxtaposition: Easton's stories, bound with Ezra's hands. 

Ezra takes his time  with the inspection. The clock in the corner is running slow, and Lord Gideon's intense scrutiny slows it even further. Each minute passes like it's been dragged from him. He's not sure how long it takes to crack a safe; they have Easton's map of the house, but Lord Gideon seem the type to lay traps. He imagines the awful machine from the pawnshop jawing at Pam's wrists. _Snap, snap, snap_. Ezra shivers.

"Something wrong Mr. Kelly?" Lord Gideon, delighted at the prospect of tragedy, is barely able to keep from smiling.  

There's a soft sound from overhead. In the thick silence of the house it echoes like a gunshot. Ezra starts, and the book falls shut. 

"Preston, take the maid and search my suite. Tell the gardener to search the grounds as well." Lord Gideon doesn't bother looking anywhere but Ezra's face. "It seems one of our guests has gotten lost."

The servants take off at speed. While Ezra understands the impulse to run from any room with Lord Gideon in it, he resents them for leaving the two of them alone. 

"You can drop the pretense," Lord Gideon says, gesturing to the book in Ezra's hands. "Fucking a gutter-rag bookseller is a commitment to the role I wasn't expecting; I didn't think he had it in him."

The house is so quiet Ezra hears every word with perfect clarity, absorbs them and takes them into himself. 

"Oh. Oh no. Did you think he loved you? You poor, stupid boy." Lord Gideon twists his diamond ring round and round. He looks more alive, color flushed in his pallid cheeks, as if feeding off Ezra's misery. "This was never about you. And when he drops you back in whatever gutter you crawled out of, you'll learn that."

He's wrong. Lord Gideon is a hateful old man living alone in his hateful old house, and Ezra wants to dismiss every word of his bile as spiteful rambling. Except, he knows about Ezra, about Easton-and-Ezra, and the plan. How does he know about the plan?

The houseboy reappears in the doorway, and Ezra's heart leaps to his throat. "We didn't find anyone, sir."

"Then look again you idiots!" Lord Gideon shouts, coloring an alarming shade of red. "He was here, I know it."

The houseboy trembles, but continues on with more courage than Ezra suspected him of. "The Greys were watching the alley just like you said sir, and they haven't seen anyone coming or going."

Lord Gideon rounds on Ezra. "Where is he hiding?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Ezra says, holding the book out in front of him like a shield as Lord Gideon advances on him with a thunderous expression. "Hiding who?" 

"Do not _lie_ to me, boy" he says. Spittle flies from his mouth, and Ezra thinks he looks almost unhinged. "If you do not tell me where that bastard of mine is I will _destroy you_. I will _take you apart_." He grabs a heavy iron paperweight from the table and throws it at Ezra for emphasis.

It glances off the book of fables, and Ezra staggers. He doesn't have time to recover before Lord Gideon is picking up a teacup, and then everything goes spotty.

In the resulting chaos he hears doors slamming, a chorus of voices. Ezra pulls himself out of the room, down the front hallway. It's hard; he has to keep stopping, keep reminding himself to breath, and the ground feels unsteady under his feet. Shards of porcelain tangle in his hair. He wants to sit down, but there's the heavy tread of boots behind him that Ezra recognizes as Greys. He opens the door with heroic effort. There will be lyrical poetry, in the future, about the trials of opening that door, Ezra thinks. He's not sure where all this blood is coming from. It's all over his hands, and, more upsettingly, the book, which he cradles to his chest. 

"Is it raining?" He murmurs. He head feels...wet. Standing is getting to be a lot of effort. So is keeping his eyes open. 

The street is empty, which is a small blessing. The house behind him is a confusion of noise, but there's no one there to see Ezra slump over in the gutter and give himself over to unconsciousness.  

 

8.

“You just missed the Greys,” Ezra says when Easton turns up at the hospital a handful of hours later. “The houseboy helped talk them down from dragging me away in chains, but I'm still a person of interest. I've been asked not to leave town.”

“Ezra,” Easton starts, but he can’t find the words to continue. His eyes are fixed on the bandages. Ezra’s not sure what he’s seeing--there was a lot of blood--but the nurse changed them less than an hour ago so it can’t be anything too gory. They found him some clothes without blood on them; Ezra tries not to think about where, or who, they got them from.

Easton reaches out like he means to touch him and Ezra flinches.

“ _Ezra_ ,” Easton says, like he's the one that took a face-full of china. He’s got something clutched in his hands. The marbled cover of the book of fables winks at him in the dim hospital light. It’s binding is even more broken than before. Ezra wonders where his dad’s tools are, if anyone thought to grab them. He’ll have to ask Pam to go back for the cart.

“I think I'm going to stay with Pam for a while,” he says quietly, when it becomes clear Easton can't, or won't, say anything else. “I'll be by to get my things in a few days.”

“Take your time,” Easton says. His voice sounds ragged, but Ezra can't tell if it's the cigarettes, or some deeply held emotion. When he presses his lips together like that, Ezra thinks, he almost looks like his father.

Pam is waiting for them at the park two streets down from the hospital. They walk slow, Easton with one hand hovering over Ezra’s back waiting for him to swoon again. He doesn't touch Ezra though. Ezra’s not sure if he wants him to. He won’t be able to do this if he lets Easton touch him, if he lets him kiss Ezra into pliant forgiveness. Not when Ezra can't stop thinking about what Lord Gideon said, the things he knew, and how much it hurts, tugging like a fishhook on his heart.

Pam, bless their soul, doesn't say a word. They inspect Ezra's bandages and nod, satisfied with the nurse's stitching. 

"You have the feet of a ghost." Ezra murmurs. "I was in the parlor downstairs--I didn't hear a thing."

"I found it, if that's what you're asking," Pam says, a small smile touching the corners of their mouth. "Here."

From their coat pocket they pull out a pocket watch. It's not heavily gilded, the way Ezra's seen some of the truly loaded Gilts wear them. It's not even studded with jewels, or set with pearls. The copper face has a curling wave pattern across half of it, nothing more. It's a watch that could belong to anyone. 

Until Pam opens it. 

There are no pictures inside, no engravings or sweet words. There isn't even a clock, anymore. Some enterprising soul hollowed out the belly of the watch and filled it with a treasure infinitely more precious. 

Color spills out across the grass, to the edges of the empty park. Street lights and shrubs light up under the power of the watch's glow, wet and angry and vital, the whole world come alive with it. If blood had a color it would look the way this light, this park looks now; ripped from the heart of the Earth, and still warm. 

Pam snaps the watch shut again. They're breathing hard. Ezra releases his grip on their arm--he hadn't even realized he'd grabbed them--and looks at Easton. 

"What did we do?" When Lord Gideon finds out what he's lost--when, not if--he'll make good on his threats. Ezra will be ruined. 

"I left the second watch in the safe, like we discussed," Pam says, trembling. "But this..." 

"He'll keep quiet," Easton looks at Ezra. He's slouching the way he does when he wants to appear calm, but his fingers are white-knuckled around the book of fables. "He's not one of the five; the shade isn't his to keep in the first place." 

"And you want to steal from them, too, don't you?" Ezra's voices breaks on the last word, accent slipping. "No. I'm done. I'm out."

"Ezra-" Easton looks like he's been slapped. 

"-no." He takes the watch from Pam and thrusts it back into Easton's hands. "It's not worth it." 

"Keep it," Easton says, and if Easton Lynch ever begged Ezra thinks it would sound the way his voice sounds now, like the sound glass makes under the heel of a boot. “Hold onto it for me, will you?” Easton pleads, his voice fraying, closing Ezra’s hand around the warm metal of the watch. “Please.”

Ezra wants to throw it at the wall and watch the whole world burn red. It hurts like Easton’s gut him, and underneath that hurt is a wellspring of fury. How dare he manage to fold everything they are to each other into a watch and chain, when Ezra feels like a hole’s been ripped open in his chest? How is it that Ezra is in this place again, just him and Pam, a watch, and a handful of coppers in his pocket? How is it that Ezra can still be this stupid?

Easton leaves. Ezra doesn’t watch him go.

He passes the watch over to Pam. They don’t need Ezra to say the words, they just take it and tuck it safely away in their rabbit’s warren of a coat where Erza doesn’t have to look at it.

 

9.

The Glass Dial opens its doors just in time for Pam to install Lord Gideon’s pocket watch in their safe, away from prying eyes.

“Now you’ve got a place to pile all those watches you keep collecting,” Pam says.

“Right,” Ezra says, watching the bright spill of color dance across the walls, swirling against the pockmarked ceiling. He doesn’t have to tell Pam that this time it’s different--Easton’s different--he thinks they know.

There was color over the whole world, once. Ezra’s mind can’t wrap around the idea. Imagine: a thousand different shades, so many there weren’t enough words for them all. Ezra feels that familiar hunger in his belly, turning the watch over in his hands. All that knowledge, all those words, all those colors. What if they _could_ get them back? Would that be wrong? All the stealing and lying Ezra's done over the years has been for the singular goal of keeping himself and Pam alive. This isn't pinching some rich nob's law books to put food on the table, though. This is out-and-out theft. 

Still, he can hear Easton’s voice whispering in his ear like a devil on his shoulder, _l_ _et me tell you a story about a Queen, and a world where everything breathed in color._

Shaderunning is a hard left from the gilded future Ezra always dreamed for himself. He tries to put himself back on track. Across town there’s a Pavarinian Navy Captain waiting for him. Ezra tries to convince himself he's excited by imagining the captain’s collection of maps, maps filled with constellations he's never heard of and oceans he's never seen. It's more difficult than it should be.

  

10.

“They weren’t...really sweethearts, were they?” Dom asks. He’s looking from Kelly to Lynch, adorably confused.

Ivo lights a cigarette. “There’s definitely nothing sweet about Lynch and Kelly. Who told you that?”

Dom shrugs, embarrassed. “Mr. Lynch, but I figured maybe it was a line.”

“Hm.” Ivo glances over to where Kelly and Lynch are going at it. Sweethearts. Now that would be one hell of a story.

**Author's Note:**

> Ezra: *looking at Easton* I can't believe I'm going to sleep with him  
> Pam: You don't have to?  
> Ezra: Nooo, I'm gonna do it
> 
> EDIT: Now with [a bonus playlist!](https://open.spotify.com/user/the-lostlenore/playlist/4moeDmuXIPb1iFLKUoDRvm)


End file.
